


Shades of Red

by cgner



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Jily Trope Fest, Veela, where they both work at potter potions company
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-25
Updated: 2016-06-25
Packaged: 2018-07-23 17:24:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7472940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cgner/pseuds/cgner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lily Evans is just too distracting. Especially her hair - what color is it, exactly? 1 distracted James + 1 poorly attended cauldron = 1 fortuitous (?) accident.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shades of Red

**Author's Note:**

> This story owes a lot to the many Veela fic I’ve read over the years, especially Drop Dead Gorgeous. Thanks to Ayesha for the last-minute beta job!

James isn’t even supposed to be in the lab today.

His mum had wanted him home for some important luncheon with her friends—“They’re bringing their _daughters_ ,” she’d said, singing the last word—but he’d met all her friends’ daughters, and more importantly, the menu she’d chosen was crap. He claimed he had some urgent potion simmering away that needed stirring today.

He could’ve gone literally anywhere besides the lab, of course. His mother isn’t mad enough to double-check his whereabouts, but little tempts him more than what he can find in the lab on a monsoon of a Saturday.

He hadn’t intended to do any real work, but then Lily had walked in to visit Mary, which he’d known she would, and he’d had to keep up the pretense of being there to do something besides ogle her.

His hands fiddle around with the potion while he mentally berates himself for every stupid thing he’d ever said in front of Lily.

Once he’d tried to compliment her hair, but she’d thought he’d said bear, and the whole stupid conversation had devolved into him telling her about a documentary about a man who’d tried to live peacefully with bears.

Maybe it would have been an interesting topic at another time, but discussing how the bears had eaten the man alive was probably not the best topic to bring up as they were waiting in the cafeteria line.

It had taken Remus to point that out.

“I’m hopeless,” James had moaned, trying his hardest to sink into a chair hard enough that he’d stop being human and start being one with the chair. Chairs probably lived very simple, contented lives, he reasoned. Chairs never made fools of themselves in front of vermillion-haired women.

Chairs never went through color swatches to find the right word to describe someone’s hair color.

Chairs also never didn’t pay attention to what they were putting into a potion.

“Oh, shit,” he says, as his makeshift potion erupts like a miniature volcano, bursting over the edges of the cauldron, small blobs hurtling through the air.

A few settle on his hands.

He yelps, yanking his hands toward his chest and darting backwards away from the table.

A classic mistake in lab safety, not putting up his wards. A classic mistake that again, a chair would never make, because a chair would never skip over normal procedures to get set up in time for a woman to enter a room—

He holds up his hands for inspection, but the pearlescent potion oddly doesn’t burn. In fact, it’s kind of soothing, like aloe, and the swirling, churning mess his stomach had been in calms down—

“Get it _off_ ,” says a woman’s voice, and James wrenches his eyes up toward Lily, oh god, _Lily_ , she’d seen him make a fool of himself _again_ —

With a few neat flicks of her wand, the potion vanishes off his skin.

“What were you _thinking_?” she says, now battling against the apparently endless potion seeping out of his cauldron.

“Uh—” is his clever response.

His fingers twine in his hair while his face tries to burn itself up with blood overflow.

“I’ll get Mr. Potter,” she tells him. “Stay put and—are you all right?”

“Um.” James sweeps a look down over his body. “I’m in one piece.”

“That I can see, but are you having any other side effects I need to treat right away?”

His mind, his stupid, _stupid_ mind, immediately starts thinking through some absurd retort about an erection and thank _god_ he manages to say, meekly, “Just weirdness.”

The erection-thing isn’t the weirdness—that’s normal. It was that sudden wave of calm, but that’s gone now, too.

Lily darts out the door, leaving James with a cauldron that’s finally slowing down its output, and Mary across the room. She’s just now managing to stabilize her own potion enough for her to come over.

He’s not offended – lab rules are mind your own cauldron first.

“I’m fine,” he calls over to Mary. “Don’t ruin your cauldron to come over here.”

 _So I can wallow in peace_ , he silently adds.

“You sure you’re all right?”

“Just feeling stupid.”

“So normal, then?”

“You’re a riot, Mary. Can’t imagine why I don’t want you over here.”

He hops up onto another lab table and lets his long legs dangle over the edge.

Idiot. He’s such an idiot. His dad will tell Sirius about this and then Sirius will know and Sirius will guess exactly why James was one, at work on a Saturday, and two, distracted.

His dad rushes in, barely glances at the potion, and puts James through all the normal potions-incident testing.

Of course, part of this is listing out what was in the potion. These are notes that James should have been taking diligently.

He scans over the various ingredients he’d picked out of the stores at random. Moondew, bloodroot, peacock feather, and—

“Veela hair?” his dad asks. “You know that’s volatile.”

“Ummmm.”

“What were you even trying to create?” His dad picks up James’s lab parchment. “All you’ve written here are _garnet, currant_ , _merlot_ —”

James snatches the list out of his hand and crumples it up. “Thinking about painting my room.”

“Mhm,” says his dad, peering at James over the top of his glasses. “Who knew thinking about interior design could be so captivating.”

James scowls.

“Chock this one up to distraction, then?”

 _Distraction_ —Lily isn’t a distraction, she’s just got the charisma of the sun, drawing in everyone with her gravitational pull—

“James?”

That’s not his dad, though, it’s Mary. She’s wandered over their way, but she’s never sounded so dreamy—so wistful.

James rubs the back of his neck. “You didn’t hear any of that, Mary, did you?”

Her dark eyes are wide, a vague smile plastered on her face. “James,” she says, sounding like she’s never had anything quite as pleasant as his name on her tongue. “Did you know I once flew around the world on a broom without stopping?”

James blinks at her.

He turns to his dad.

His dad turns to him, beaming.

“Dad?” James asks, his voice rising in panic.

“I was on Wizard Weekend’s Five Fittest Witches list,” she adds, and now she’s in James’s personal bubble, her breasts almost brushing against his chest, her face lifted up toward him while she licks her lips and _oh god what has he done_.

His dad slaps him on the shoulder. “We’ve been trying to duplicate that for centuries,” he says. “Well done.”

\--

So. Having Veela charms. It’s…weird.

He manages to disentangle himself from Mary’s advances long enough to escape the lab. His dad holds her back, promising to bottle up James’s creation for him.

Dazed, James stumbles out toward the lobby, the only Apparition-friendly space in the building. He’s got to get home. He’s got to shower and get off whatever Veela nonsense is on him.

But whatever effect he had on Mary, everyone else in the building seems to be immune to it. He tenses every time he passes a woman in the corridor, and almost panics when a woman enters the lift with him, but there’s nothing weird about the interactions. A couple of them he knows, and they chat. The ones he doesn’t know at least give him the polite _smile at the owner’s_ _son_ reaction.

Not one come-on from any of them.

Maybe, he thinks as he Apparates back to his flat, it was a one-off. Just a short-term pheromone he was emanating that’s already dissipated.

He doesn’t tell Sirius about it, of course, because Sirius would bring it up until James was lying in a coffin underground.

The torrential rain hasn’t let up, so they drop in at Remus’s bookshop out of boredom. Technically it’s James’s bookshop, but he’d bought it to impress a girlfriend—or so he claimed—and then he’d “discovered” that he had no aptitude for it. Poor Moony had had to step in to save his arse.

The moment they step in the door, shaking off their umbrellas, Remus calls to the back, “Peter, ring the Aurors. Some hoodlums have entered the shop.”

James and Sirius spend the afternoon deliberately messing with Moony’s organizational system, Remus hexes them when customers aren’t browsing the goods, and Peter settles the dispute by offering Sirius the advanced reader’s copy of a book he’s been itching for.

All in all, it’s a rather nice Saturday afternoon, and they charm their shoes impervious to go down to the chip shop for dinner.

There’s some woman with dyed red hair ahead of them in line, which of course gets James reminiscing about how sensibly Lily had taken charge this morning – good mind for a crisis, that one, James would trust her with his life—

The woman in front of him turns around to flings herself at James, wrapping her arms around his neck.

“Darling,” she says, “take me now.”

While the incident might have been somewhat bothersome on its own merits—there were some strange explanations made to the other patrons, the woman gently pried off of James by Remus—the much worse outcome is that he has to explain that morning’s events to his mates. To _Sirius_.

James demands Sirius moves out of the flat as a preemptive move to all the humiliation that will ensue otherwise, but Sirius just tilts back in his chair and smugly devours some of James’s chips.

Remus, sensibly, asks, “Why do you suppose the other women weren’t affected?”

James shrugs one shoulder, still red in the face—scarlet, really, he’s very up to date on his shades of red—and says, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

This is an option he is given until the next morning, when he and Sirius return from a ride on Sirius’s motorbike. James is thinking that maybe Lily would be very impressed by a ride on a motorbike – he heard her talking about Quidditch once, so she must like flying.

They’ve just landed again, and are driving the Muggle way up to their building when a tiny brunette flings herself in their path. Sirius skids sideways to a very dramatic, very cool halt, James clinging to his waist.

Even before they’ve fully stopped, she’s tugging at James’s arms, trying to get him off the bike and professing her love.

“This,” Sirius says, pushing the woman so hard she falls on her arse, “just stopped being funny.”

\--

Of course, he finds it hilarious again later, when a woman their mother’s age grabs James’s arse while James is buying milk. But that’s after he’s dragged James to their parents’ house for Fleamont to properly inspect.

But his parents had likewise found it hilarious, and his dad is so over the moon about James’s discovery that he just ended up breaking out champagne.

“To my son’s desperation!” he said, lifting up his glass. Later, when he was quite tipsy, he told James, “Don’t worry, the effects are probably temporary. And it seems intermittent anyway.”

His friends and family are all getting plenty of laughs out of this, but James seems to be getting nothing.

At least until he’s walking home and sees that blonde woman from the first floor. She’s sitting on the front steps of their building, smoking a cigarette and scrolling through her phone. If he weren’t pining after Lily, this woman might have been the subject of his affections.

They’ve exchanged words in the past. Not great words on James’s part, because the moment he tries to actually pull a woman his age, his verbal abilities sink to the level of a five-year-old with rocks in their mouth. But words have definitely been exchanged.

And she’s got these fantastic, full lips that he’s thought about several times, and—and wouldn’t it be nice if he could actually get some benefit out of having Veela charms?

Not that he’d _use_ them use them, but if he could…maybe…just get them a little interested? Instead of throwing-themselves-in-front-of-moving-vehicles interested. So he could relax. Because those rocks disappear from his mouth when he know that it’s not all one-sided. His last two girlfriends asked him out, which worked out perfectly. He barely had to suffer through his affection-induced idiocy before he knew for certain they liked him back.

He hasn’t tried to actively use the Veela charms so far – they really just spring out of nowhere, it seems. But he tries to imagine reaching into his chest, grabbing a dial, and nudging it up.

She looks up at him and smiles as he approaches, the cigarette dangling from her fingers.

“Evening,” she says.

He dares to sit down right next to her without asking. “Evening.”

And it’s fine. It’s _fine_. She’s talking to him and he’s got an invisible support on his side, so he can relax and pretend to follow what she says when she talks about football. He learned early on that to live in Muggle London meant having a team, so he found a newspaper and picked a team at random so he could pass as a normal English person.

“It was nice to have an actual conversation with you,” she says, stubbing her cigarette out on the steps.

“Oi,” he says, “what do we normally have?”

“You making weird comments about how much you love Wales and telling me about your cat.”

“Yes, well, I’m—er.”

“That’s normally more how it goes, yeah.”

But at least she’s smiling when she says it.

“I’m a changed man,” he says with confidence. “Although I do still love my cat.”

\--

He goes to the shop late at night just to make sure it wasn’t a fluke. He nudges the dial, and chats up the cashier and a woman he found looking at ice cream.

It’s remarkable, not worrying about them not liking him. And not one of them sexually assaults him. He’s definitely got this under control.

Which is great because he has work on Monday, and he hardly needs his coworkers trying to snog him senseless all the time. If nothing else, there would be many more potions accidents.

So it’s all smooth sailing. He gets into work, sets up at his station, actually does the proper documentation and safety routines, and tries to figure out what the hell he did on Saturday.

And then Lily walks in. It’s only him and Bertram in the lab so far, and she makes right for him, and he freezes.

But no, he has a plan, he has _Veela charms_.

He forces himself to adjust the invisible dial and smiles at her, and maybe it’s a little goofy, but it gets that worried look off her face, and it’s _working_. She’s going to like him.

Not that he’ll misuse his powers really, he just needs her to see him more natural, needs to see that he’s worthwhile, and then he can drop the dial—

“You certainly look fine,” she says, propping a hip against the edge of his lab table.

“I’m insulted. I took extra time with my hair today, you know.”

She laughs. “I find it hard to believe you spend any time on that.”

“It’s true, this is all natural. Beauty often is.”

“I’d heard that the potion gave you Veela powers, but I didn’t know that also came with conceitedness.”

“Is it conceit if my hair is that good? Because I think that’s just regular pride. Would you rather I lied and said I hated my hair?”

There’s one of those stellar smiles on her face right now and James could die happy right now that it’s leveled at him, _because_ of him.

“Are you trying to get me to admit that I like your hair?” she asks.

“I don’t need reassurance. I know it’s wonderful, and so I know you, as someone with good taste, must appreciate it.”

That gets another few laughs out of her.

“I know that ridiculousness isn’t part of being a Veela.”

“No,” he says solemnly. “It’s all me.”

“Well, are you so caught up on your hair that you can’t duplicate what you did on Saturday?”

He passes a hand over the ingredients spread across his lab table. “I think you’re caught up enough in how good my hair looks that you missed the evidence in front of you.”

She’s cackling this time. “You really have gone over the top, haven’t you?”

“I can tone it down,” he says, and adjusts the dial. “Anyway, are you going to help me or what?”

“Well, since you asked so nicely.”

“I wouldn’t ask just anyone, you know. You’re the best of the new recruits.”

“Flatterer.”

“It’s okay to take some pride in your work.”

“I’ll take some of yours. That should deflate you enough that you can come back down to earth with the rest of us normal souls.”

He mimes yanking a dagger out of his chest.

“Get to work,” she says through a laugh.

\--

She’s helping get all the wards properly arranged, which gives him a second to breath, a second to try to tamp down the fireworks going off inside of himself. He’s talking to her _he’s talking to her_ and it’s going so well—

Until he has to explain what he was up to on Saturday.

“What do you mean you have no idea what you put in there?” She’s resting her arms on the table, across the cauldron from him.

“I mean, er, I was half asleep,” he says. “And not thinking properly.”

“Mhm.”

“And—and—hungover.”

“And high?”

“I mean, possibly, I don’t test my food for drugs in the morning—”

“You’re hopeless,” she says, grinning at him.

“No,” he says, and it feels dangerous to say this, but he does, “I’m not entirely without hope.”

She quirks her eyebrows at him. Her perfect, vermillion eyebrows. “Good.”

He can’t even process anything other than how perfect this moment is, there is no universe outside of them just them in this well-lit, funky-smelling lab where he used to run amok as a kid, and now she’s here and she is so. fucking. brilliant.

She sorts through his fumbling explanation of his potion and turns it into sense.

“Pearlescent?” she asks, and measures out some moondew.

“Bubbling?” she says later, and gives the potion a clockwise stir.

“ _Veela hair_?” That one stops her in her tracks. “What were you thinking?”

“Haven’t we established that I _wasn’t_?”

“Unbelievable. It’s really a miracle you haven’t accidentally killed yourself already, isn’t it?”

“There’s a particular brand of Potter luck—genius, too, one might even say—”

“I thought I was the best of the new recruits.”

“I’m not a new recruit.”

“Touché.”

She gets the potion to a state that looks pretty similar to what he developed on Saturday, but there’s no corresponding explosion.

There’s also no good way to test it without potentially infecting someone else.

Her brow furrows as she studies the simmering potion. “There’s nothing for it but animal testing.” Then she cocks her head. “And an antidote, I suppose.”

“Antidote?”

“In case the effects are permanent.”

“Oh. Ah. Right.”

There was the whole women putting themselves in danger thing, and the arse grabbing, and the general weirdness of having to watch for crazed women all the time.

But he had it under control now. He _did_.

“I’m not so worried about an antidote,” he says. “Honestly. It’s fine.”

Until later, when he’s heading for a meeting. He spots Lily down the corridor. The sun is streaming through a window, enveloping her in a perfect sunbeam, and James forgets to breathe for a moment.

He remembers very swiftly, though, when a woman throws herself at him quite literally. Only his Quidditch-trained reflexes save them from tumbling down a wide, stone staircase.

Marjorie from accounting won’t stop trying to press her mouth against his, and he’s shoving his hands over her mouth to fight her off, and then someone’s pulling Marjorie off of him.

“It’s fine, eh?” Lily asks, holding back a struggling Marjorie.

“Perfectly,” James squeaks.

Because yes, maybe he almost died, but he got to spend the morning talking to Lily like he’s a normal human being. So, really, things aren’t _so_ bad.

Lily manages to get out of her afternoon meeting to help James sort out the potion. Or rather, James cranks up his dial and tells Lily’s boss that James needs her for a dire potions situation, and Dorcas winks at him and sends him off.

Veela charms are the _best_.

They give it another go that afternoon, chatting while the potion bubbles away in front of them.

“Is your ego more tolerable this afternoon?” she asks.

“It depends,” he says. “On the one hand, I’ve always found Marjorie rather attractive in her own way, so that certainly boosted my self-perception—”

“She’s at least _ninety_ —”

“A good ninety, though, don’t you think?”

“Sleeping your way to the top, is that it?”

“I hear it’s the only way to get ahead in this company.”

 _Christ_ , if he could only bottle up the way her laugh makes him feel indestructible—the building itself could crash down right now but somehow he’d make it through, with her at his side—

“Does this look better or worse?” she asks, glancing down at the potion. “It’s turned a lighter blue.”

“Better, I think,” he says, and throws in a peacock feather.

“ _James—_ ”

“I know, I know, it _seems_ like a risky move,” he says, “but that’s definitely something I would do here. The residual effects of the bloodroot—”

“—mellow it out, of course. I’ve never mixed those two before.”

He shrugs. “Me neither. It just seemed like the right thing to do.”

“Some instinct you’ve got there, Potter.”

“And here I thought I’d be waiting forever for a compliment, since you think I’m already so bigheaded—”

“You’re right. I take it back.”

“You can’t take it back.”

“I can, and I have. I think you’re an idiot.”

“This idiot figured out how to replicate Veela charms.”

“No, this idiot accidentally mimicked the effects _once_ , on himself, and can’t figure out how to do it again.” She checks the cauldron again. “I’m going to set up at the next table and work on the antidote.”

“ _Why_ —I mean, you don’t have to, that’s very generous, but—”

“James, Marjorie almost killed you.”

“It was very well intentioned, though.”

“I’m not going to let you be murdered by a bewitched grandmother.”

“I think of the ways to go, that wouldn’t be so bad.” He considers this. “Evans, are you saying you’d miss me if I died?”

“No,” she says, too quickly. “Of course not.”

His mouth slashes into a grin. “Oho, Evans, what have we here?”

“Me making an antidote. Farewell, and keep good notes!”

\--

It’s not really farewell – she’s right there, set up next to him, studying his ingredients and trying to find counterbalances to them.

The thing is, if anyone can do it, she can. He’s seen her reports, watched her presentations to the group, studied the vials of her work afterhours.

All right, the last one is a little creepy, yes, but that one is a result of admiration and jealousy. He just makes up potions as he goes. She’s much more methodical, and consistent.

He’s always thought they’d make a great team.

And now they are. Except she’s going to _ruin_ him.

But he won’t sabotage her – he’s not that big of a fiend, and he wants her to succeed, and maybe at some point he’ll want the antidote.

His last batch didn’t look quite right, and certainly didn’t turn into a volcano – it had a roiling boil at best. This time he actually can focus a little better because he’s not so caught up on the way Lily’s lips pull into a smile; this time he can really let his instinct drive.

Toward the end, though, he starts gazing over at her again. Today has officially been the best day of his life. She’s been borderline _flirting_ with him, and he’s been _natural_ and _funny_ and then his potion turns into a miniature geyser again.

This time the wards catch it, though, entrapping the pearly potion in a ring around the cauldron.

Lily rushes over and snatches his notes sheet. “Did you add a counter-clockwise stir after the feather this time? Because I was thinking that might do it, even though it sounds counter-intuitive—”

“Oh. No, that’s brilliant, though, I hadn’t—ah, no. I added a dash of salt.”

“Salt. Are you taking the mickey?”

“No, I just—salt makes everything taste better, so, you know.”

“Did you add salt on Saturday?”

“Ah, no, but you know, sometimes you just get a feeling….”

She smacks the parchment on top of his head. Or tries to, anyway. It’s parchment so it mostly just flops on top of him.

“You idiot,” she says, but fondly.

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“We won’t know until testing.”

“Right. Well. Seems to be working, anyway. I talked to Benjy about getting some animal testing going—”

“Brilliant.”

“I’ll try the counter-clockwise stir this time, though. See if that amplifies.”

“Oh, yes, decrease the energy then, set up more room for a reaction—”

He grins. “Exactly. Well, looks like I’m not the only one with brilliant instincts around here.”

She lifts her chin, but there’s definitely a dusting of red across her cheeks. A shade of raspberry, if he’s going to be precise.

And really, he thinks, as she flits away from him, there’s no reason not to.

\--

Their suspicions about the stirs are right, and the next batch explodes even higher, although James almost misses it as he stares at Lily, who’s stirring her own potion so precisely. He always gets lazy and uneven, and he’s been mixing potions his whole life.

Lily takes a pause from her antidote to try to replicate his steps.

They don’t work. The potion doesn’t so much as bubble to the top of the cauldron.

“Your instructions are faulty,” she says. “You missed something.”

“I didn’t! I swear. That’s exactly what I did. Honest.”

“Then why isn’t it working?”

He has no answer to that. He’d watched her do the whole process, made sure she replicated everything he did.

Except, ha, of course she actually watched the potion, instead of constantly letting her gaze wander over to someone else—

Someone else she had an enormous crush on, oh, _shit._

Intention potions are so rare, but so powerful, and _shit._

“Um,” he says.

“James. What is it?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. I, er, have had no sudden insights.”

She punches his shoulder, but it’s not enough to pry his secret out of him. Not that it’s really a _secret_ , it’s just—ugh. A mess, that’s what it is.

_Oh, yeah, just think about the person you’re basically in love with, and then the potion will work. Oh, who was I thinking of? Ah, no one in particular, you know, Marjorie, maybe…._

He’s not that good a liar.

“Look,” she says. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to try to steal the credit—”

“ _No_ , that’s not—I have an _idea_ , all right, a stupid one, but I need to test it.”

“Then get to work, yeah? I want to know what it is.”

This time he makes himself think about Quidditch as he wraps up the potion. Specifically, how the Harpies need to replace their third Chaser because she’s just garbage, really, even if she is the owner’s second cousin.

No explosion.

Probably an inert potion.

Yup. That’s it. Too bad he’ll have to kill himself before he can tell Lily the trick.

It’s a shame, really, because they’d come so close….

“Oh, you broke it,” she says, peering into the cauldron. “So your theory was right?”

“Isn’t it always?” he sighs.

“Show a little enthusiasm. You look like your cat died.”

“Well… It’s just… Um….”

He can’t lie, but he can’t _not_ tell her something….

“You have to be thinking about. Um. Something specific.”

Her eyes light up. “An intention potion? Of _course_!”

“So, yeah, I’ll just, uh, start writing up some things, and we’ll do the testing, and you’ll work on that antidote—”

“What do you need to be thinking about to make it work?”

“I reeeeally would rather not say.”

“What could possibly be so—”

He’s so carefully looking anywhere but at her.

“ _Oh_ ,” she says, because _of course_ , she’s too fucking brilliant. “Oh.”

“Anyway, I need to go curl up in a ball and die now, so nice meeting you, I hope you’ll come to my funeral.”

She grabs his forearm. “James.”

“No talking me out of it—”

“D’you want to go get a drink?”

His internal debate over whether to hurl himself down the stairs or whether to poison himself immediately fades into a blur.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“You know what I said.”

That raspberry dusting is back on her face, this time more pronounced.

“Like, to celebrate our work?”

“And, you know….”

He thought he’d had internal fireworks before, but those were _nothing_ , those were puny, insignificant _sparks_ compared to what he’s got now, his whole body is going to _explode_ —

But no.

He can’t.

Because he’s a fucking _Veela_ right now, and why the _fuck_ did he think this plan wouldn’t come back and bite him in the arse? She’s just—she’s just _charmed_ , and he shouldn’t have let it go this far—

“Or not,” she says, dropping his arm, her whole face scarlet now. “I’m sorry, I thought you—”

“I’m a Veela,” he blurts. “Temporarily, you know, and I can’t turn it off and you’re—”

“Immune,” she supplies, a tentative smile forming. “My friend’s cousin is a Veela, and it’s never worked on me. So if you thought you were affecting me—well, you weren’t.”

“Oh. _Oh_.” The fireworks return, albeit a little less enthusiastically. “So you want—to go—with _me_ —”

“No, I want to go with your internal Veela. I hear it feels like a monster in your chest.”

“Hm? No. Not remotely.”

“Oh. Well, in any case, you can bring him if you must. I’ll just fight off hordes of women.”

“It’s only—” he starts, and then has a modicum of sense come through, and finishes the rest of that thought internally.

 _It’s only when I want you_ , he thinks. And if she’s with him, he won’t be pining, and hopefully they won’t have waitresses sitting in his lap all evening.

“Work on that antidote, yeah?” he says. “I mean. Tomorrow. After we. Erm.”

She pushes gently against his chest. “It’s on the top of my list. After _we, erm_. But we can’t _erm_ until we’ve both tidied up, yeah?”

“Yeah. Yeah!” His mouth hurts from grinning so much. “I’m, ah, on it. Now. Quickest tidying up ever.”

She laughs, and god, if he can invent Veela charms, he’s got to find a way to bottle that laugh….

But later. For now, he’s got to help her fix him. And see how the animal testing goes. And _erm_ with Lily.

And, maybe, he thinks, beaming at her as he tidies up—just maybe, somewhere in there, he’ll maybe work up the nerve to kiss her.

And he won’t even need Veela charms to do it.


End file.
